


The Life You Knew Before

by tansypool



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst, Gen, mary is probably not going to have a good time in the near future, set after part 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 08:36:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18384851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tansypool/pseuds/tansypool
Summary: Mary Wardwell awakens, to the world not quite feeling right.





	The Life You Knew Before

**Author's Note:**

> Mary is not going to have a great time in part 3, so I figured I'd get a headstart on her misery, while we all get started on the misery of waiting for it.

It’s only been a few hours, she thinks, maybe a night. She feels strangely well-rested, and calm, despite the vague sense of a strangely realistic dream, of everything and of nothing at all. Not that she can remember much of it beyond the movie she thinks she saw – and it ended so late, but the clock by her bed says it’s early in the evening. She must have slept all day.

And all she can focus on is the sense that she’s rather hungry. It’s the only thing that pulls her out of bed.

She stubs her toe against a kitchen chair that shouldn’t be where it is, and the pain shakes the last lingering drowsiness from her head. When she looks, there’s nothing in the fridge – but she’s never been good at keeping it full. Adam was always better at that, when he was home.

There are no messages from him, but he so often winds up silent for months at a time, wherever he ends up. It’s completely expected to not hear from him overnight. No messages at all, the light remaining dark – she must have rung the school last night, to say she wasn’t coming in. It must have been a full day that she was asleep for, which would explain the hunger. Not that it feels like she’s been asleep for a day.

Then again, she’s not thinking about much beyond the fact that she is utterly starving.

The café is always open late – Greendale thrives in the evenings, even if she doesn’t. She’s bumped into students there before, and they always seem to find it a little strange, even though everyone in town goes here. But she’s never seen them look so shocked. Their conversation is stilted, hesitant – and it ends quickly.

She eats in silence, too focused on her hunger to dwell on the strange looks from the children. Images solidify in her mind – she definitely knows that she saw the movie, and she has a strange sense of driving home in the rain, of seeing a girl on the side of the road, of trying to help her.

Her students are still there when she leaves, watching her go with a disjointed chorus of _Goodnight, Ms Wardwell_ echoing from the table, and with faces that look as though they’ve seen a ghost. Wide eyes, the colour lost from their faces, their conversation having halted as soon as she stood up.

Half of them have had haircuts, and she’s never seen Sabrina and Harvey willingly sit apart. But kids are fickle. She doesn’t even try to keep up with who is dating who, or what the fashion is.

She steps outside, stares up at the trees, at the water dripping from the leaves. It must have rained earlier, though she must have slept through it. October always has such unpredictable weather. The leaves are greener than they were when she last looked up – but then, she doesn’t look up all that often.

She couldn’t focus on anything besides food earlier, and had left the house in the clothes she had woken up in – normally, she would never, but she couldn’t make herself delay even that few minutes. She hadn’t noticed much earlier beyond an unblinking answering machine, leaving the house hurriedly, but there’s a lurch of something being wrong when she steps over the threshold of her home.

Her coat falls to the floor when it doesn’t land on the hatstand that should have been by her door – she turns on the light, and it’s nowhere in sight.

The cross above her fireplace is upside down. It isn’t hung securely, but it shouldn’t be able to do that. She corrects it with a shaking hand, tries to calm her breath, and the feeling of the ghost of somebody else lingering in the shadows.

The feeling of foreboding grows, making her feel ill. There’s nothing _wrong_ that she can see, but so much that isn’t _right_.

Making her way through the house, it’s tiny things that stand out to her, tiny things that have somehow changed. Things slightly off-kilter, out of place, gone from where they should have been, and placed where they should not. She isn’t sure how she managed to black out whatever happened between the movie and waking up, when something must have happened. If nothing else, surely she’d remember buying that many candles – they’re in every room, puddles of wax melted onto whatever surface they were placed on.

She hadn’t looked in her wardrobe earlier, but she opens it to find pyjamas, and instead finds a dozen or more dresses, all beautiful, all things she would never wear. But as she looks, she gets a brief flickering image in the back of her mind – of herself, staring into a mirror, smoothing glossy silk against her thighs, staring at herself as though seeing herself for the first time.

She shakes her head, tries to get the dream that feels far too real out of her head, and slams the wardrobe shut.

Despite her best efforts, her pyjamas are nowhere to be found in her bedroom, everything she thought she owned replaced by silks and brocades. At least there is an old terry towelling dressing gown folded in back of the linen closet, which will have to suffice.

There are more candles in the bathroom, and something dark staining the grout between the tiles. She tells herself that it’s just rust, and refuses to think beyond that, refuses to acknowledge the flashes of something that she doesn’t want to put into words. She lets the water run scalding hot, and sinks beneath it, trying to burn the images from her mind.

But she can’t shake them, and they soon merge with images of herself, curled in the corner, screaming. Her throat feels hoarse with the imagined memory.

She can’t stay in there any longer, and throws herself out of the still-steaming bath, the images following her to bed, distorting and growing and not quite sticking.

She tosses and turns for some interminable period, until something resembling sleep takes over. It doesn’t linger for long enough.

Her alarm wakes her from the worst sleep she thinks she’s ever had, dreams of brimstone dissolving like smoke into the light of dawn. She’s not sure how she could dream so much when she slept so little.

Leaving her bedroom somewhat fogs the images, making last night feel like a bad dream, too.

But there are papers on her kitchen table that she doesn’t remember assigning, half of which have been corrected. Not by her – the writing looks like hers, though a sharper version of it. The strange unreality didn’t disappear in the night.

She feels like she should stay home, but it’s too late to call in sick now, especially for the second day in a row. And if she did, what would there be to say? She had a bad dream, and redesigned her home and wardrobe in a daze?

No matter, off to work. No breakfast, not even coffee, but she’s not sure she could stomach it.

If it persists, she can talk to Principal Hawthorne about taking a week off. She’s owed a few days of leave, anyway.

But being greeted as _Principal Wardwell_ by every student and staff member she passes makes her think that that conversation may not happen. None of them seem to notice her outfit – it was the most conservative of the dresses that had materialised in her wardrobe, but still feels worlds away from something she would choose to wear on a normal day, or on any day at all. Too dark, too tight, too clingy.

She wanders hesitantly into the office that she supposes is hers, sees papers on the desk with that same mutation of her handwriting on them.

There’s a diary open too, with a few meetings written in hastily, not quite sitting on the lines. She stares at the page, the foreboding boiling inside her, and she has to force herself to look to the top.

It’s the fourth of April. Six months, gone in what felt like a night, and the flashes of a dream come rushing back, relentless and endless and cruel, and in that moment, she wants nothing more than to go back to the dreamy nothingness in which she had spent those endless months.


End file.
